According to the Finnish Meteorological Institute, the past year in Finland has been somewhat warmer than usual. According to its measurements, "the average temperature for the entire country was about 3.2 degrees, which is 0.3 degrees above the long-term average of the years 1991‒2020. The annual average temperature ranged from a little over +7 degrees in the southwestern archipelago to about -1 degree in the northwestern part of Lapland."
In contrast, the past year in China was the hottest in its entire recorded history. Additionally, according to Helsingin Sanomat, it "experienced several extreme weather events and heatwave periods" last year.
Not surprisingly, December's news reported that the past year was the hottest in the world's recorded history. Therefore, it was intriguing to revisit my old hobby of studying the development of the Arctic ice cover. According to climate models, it should be warming faster than the rest of the world due to the increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The figure below shows the annual variation in the ice cover's average area throughout its measurement history.
It can be seen that despite the exceptionally warm year according to measurements taken at ground-level weather stations, the average size of the Northern polar ice cap has actually been trending more towards growth than shrinkage in recent years.
In the next figure, I drew an even more interesting graph. It represents the average size of the Northern sea ice in September - that is, the area during the month when the ice is at its minimum.
As my esteemed reader may notice, the area of the Northern sea ice was quite small last September. Not the smallest in recorded history, but the second smallest.
Therefore - or despite it - I delved with great enthusiasm into the task that I have been tackling year after year. That is, the statistical analysis of the relationship between the concentration of the most crucial greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, and the average size of the Northern sea ice in September.
In this analysis, I have taken as a starting point the hypothesis of climate models suggesting an accelerating climate change over time, which, according to these models, should be most rapid in the Earth's Arctic zone. As we all know, the ice should indicate this change through both the direct impact of warming in the Northern polar region and the increasing heat energy brought by warmer water from southern currents.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed as the picture was very similar to the previous year's corresponding analysis, as shown in the illustration below.
In the figure, the blue columns represent the number of years for which statistically significant dependence between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and the September average size of the Northern sea ice is observed using data from each respective year. As my esteemed reader can observe, this analysis clearly supported the climate models' prediction of global warming from the beginning of the measurement history until the year 2001.
From the year 2002 onward, I have drawn only red columns. Red, because there is no statistically significant dependence between atmospheric carbon dioxide and the Northern sea ice after that year.
The height of the red columns indicates the number of years of data available for each column – for example, for the year 2002, the available data includes the years 2003-2023, totaling 21 years. This is a significant eleven years longer than the statistically significant data starting from 2001.
In simple terms, this means that the annual minimum size of the Northern sea ice did indeed decrease as atmospheric carbon dioxide increased until the year 2001. However, the subsequent increase in greenhouse gas levels has not had a significant impact on the size of this ice cover. Thus, this analysis falsifies or disproves the claim derived from climate models that the Northern polar ice is melting due to the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration – or greenhouse gases in general.
The original thought in Finnish:
Sulaako arktinen merijää ilmakehän kasvihuonekaasujen lisääntyessä?
Sulaako arktinen merijää ilmakehän kasvihuonekaasujen lisääntyessä?
No comments:
Post a Comment
You are free to comment on the blog posts, but I ask you to stay on topic and adhere to respectful language and good manners.